


Feet First, Falling (Down the Rabbit Hole Again)

by CanisMajor1234



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Bisexual Characters, Bisexual Male Characters, Casual Existential Crisis, Cussing, Dream Kisses, Dreaming, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of other characters - Freeform, Past Failed Relationships, Penny pls, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Bond, Quentin has Problems, The author is a nerd, Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics, and can't actually deny it, and then real life kisses!, implied polyamory, it should be a tag, really that can be said about all my favorite characters, so much cussing, these boys have problems, which was apparently not a tag until this point?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-10-05 05:33:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10298720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CanisMajor1234/pseuds/CanisMajor1234
Summary: Chapter 1: "Penny’s not insane. He hears voices in his head, sure, but those voices aren’t necessarily his, and at the very least he learns from his own fucking mistakes."Chapter 2: "And Quentin is suddenly struck with the thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to come back every night to this, come home every night to this, to Penny lounging on Quentin’s bed with all the entitlement of a cat who very much belongs there. It’s a ridiculous thought, of course, because there’s no way in hell that anyone’s going to “make an honest man” out of Penny, much less someone like Quentin, but that doesn’t meant that it’s not-"Chapter 3: "They shower together because everyone’s already up and moving at this point. Quentin lets Margo braid his hair while Penny makes pancakes, because being up for a while doesn’t mean any of the the three people who were standing around in the kitchen when Quentin and Penny came down have actually eaten yet. Eliot hip-checks Penny on his way to grab a glass of milk, still arguing with Alice about something or another that’s probably a rollover from last night, and Penny doesn’t actually have words for this."





	1. Feet First, Falling (Down the Rabbit Hole Again)

Quentin reminds Penny of a dog he knew once.

And yeah, that sounds bad, but it won’t sound _as_ bad if you’d just give him a minute to fucking explain himself.

The dog wasn’t Penny’s- his family wasn’t nearly rich enough to support and animal on top of the mouths that already needed to be fed. He’d like to call it the neighborhood dog, but it wasn’t really that either. It was more of the neighborhood stray, all short fur and box-shaped head, stealing scraps of food and affection wherever it roamed. It was a lanky thing, always on that side of too thin, but Penny’s still pretty sure that even at its lowest it was heavier than Penny has ever been in his life. And yeah, that description kind of sounds like Quentin (minus the box-head and the heavier-than-Penny parts), but that’s not what makes Penny draw the comparisons that he does.

See, that dog- and we’re going to call her Mimi, just for the sake of finally giving the poor thing a name, even if it is years after the fact. That dog Mimi, she was a skittish thing. She didn’t get close to people in groups of three or more, and she snapped and growled at people she didn’t know (which was a lot of people). It’s not that she would bite you or anything. She’d sooner turn tail and run, really. But she just… didn’t trust. Anyone. If you wanted to get close enough to feed her, or pet her, you had to approach with a certain politeness. Not the “yes ma’am”, “no sir” kind of politeness, but a more… _animal_ curtesy. Keep your hands where she can see them, keep your eyes on hers, keep your shape as small as possible, and she might- _might_ \- let you scratch her behind the ears.

And Quentin? Penny finds that he has to approach Quentin very much the same way. Can’t move too fast around him, or he’ll tense up or flinch away. Have to look him in the eyes, or he’ll never feel comfortable enough to stop jittering. Remind him constantly that, despite his harsh language and that one time he punched Quentin in the face, Penny _can_ be gentle. And will be, if you give him a chance.

It took a long time to get Quentin to finally relax enough again that they can talk like civil people. And by “civil people”, Penny means that Quentin doesn’t run the moment the opportunity presents itself, not that Penny himself has stopped being a giant bag of dicks. Quentin even has a bit of fun in Penny’s presence, if Penny might say so himself, which is a bit of an odd thing to be proud of, but Penny _is_ . Because it took hard fucking work to get to this point. Honestly more work than Penny has ever really put into a relationship (with the exception of Kady, but that’s _different_ , alright?). And it shouldn’t bother him, how hard it took to get Quentin to trust him in comparison to Alice and Eliot and even Margo. It’s just that, well…

Quentin leaves bits of himself _everywhere_ . Memories, emotions, flickers of passing thought, left in his wake like bits of litter and thorny vines. Penny has no fucking clue how the rest of the Psychics manage while he’s constantly getting his metaphorical feet tangled in Quentin’s trash. It’s fucking annoying is what it is. Quentin apologizes when Penny tells him that, his mind for a moment flooding with _shamefearpainanxiety_ before it goes fuzzy with a barrier and, for a moment, Penny is living in just his own head.

The barrier doesn’t last. Of course it doesn’t last. It lasts about twelve hours before Penny trips over Quentin humming a Taylor Swift song, except he’s not humming out loud. He’s humming in his head, hunched over some textbook in the library, fingers of one hand twitching in a vague reflection of the forms flickering through his head and thumbnail of his other hand pressing into the bony lump of his ulnar. The pain in barely a footnote in the thoughts of this strange, skittish boy, a moment of clarity in the _fearanxietyshame_ that seems to be a constant hum beneath his skin. And yeah, Penny can be gentle. He can be real fucking gentle.

His hair is really soft under Penny’s fingers as he tucks a lock behind Quentin’s ear. It gets all up in his face when he’s studying, or shy, a makeshift barrier between him and the rest of the world, and Penny’s always kind of wanted to push his fingers through it just to see how it feels. That one lock is a tiny taste of what he wants, but it’s pretty clear that girly-ass conditioner Quentin spends so much money on pays for itself. Quentin makes a curious expression, hands fumbling on what looks to be transmogrification, and yeah, Penny’s already learned that one pretty well and yeah, he can lead Quentin through the forms. Gently. Because that’s a thing that he can do. And he still calls Quentin a piece of shit when he stumbles on it for the third time, but it’s clear from the look on Quentin’s face that Penny managed to keep most of the sharpness out of his voice.

There’s still nervousness beneath the surface of Quentin’s mind, of course, still _anxietyfearshame_ . That never really goes away. For a moment, though, Quentin’s head is blissfully, marvelously _calm_. Happy, almost, if Penny is willing to push it that far, though considering Quentin’s track record for happiness he’s not entirely sure that either of them want to.

And then there’s confusion, a bit of embarrassment, and Penny chooses that moment to make his escape.

So yeah, Penny is a bit of a coward when it comes to all this emotional bullshit. He’ll play all he goddamn likes, but the moment it gets serious, that’s when he nopes the fuck out. Because emotions, they’re funny little things. They make you trust, make you complacent, make you think that maybe this time won’t go the same way as the hundreds of times before and hey, isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Penny’s not insane. He hears voices in his head, sure, but those voices aren’t necessarily _his,_ and at the very least he learns from his own fucking mistakes.

At least, that’s what he tells himself. Except Quentin still leaves himself _everywhere_ , bits and pieces that bleed into Penny’s head even when he’s asleep, except apparently these aren’t bits of the past but waves of the present. Nightmares, Fillory and Further and psych wards and monsters beneath the skin waiting to crawl out, kept at bay by multi-color pills that are never actually taken and empty rooms with flies killing themselves against bare bulbs and beds with leather straps that chafe clawed-up wrists. And maybe it’s a sick metaphor for Quentin’s life right now, the dreams, or maybe for how his life used to be, or maybe it’s residual damage from Julia and the other hedge-bitches, but Penny wakes like he’s been drowning and with Doctor What’s-his-fuck’s voice still echoing in his head and Quentin is _screaming_.

The sound scrapes against Penny’s mind like cutlery against porcelain, sharp and ruthless, and Penny can only hope that there’s someone in the Physical house that can hear this too because his own survival instincts have kicked into overdrive and he’s not entirely sure he’s going to be able to get any closer without clawing his own goddamn throat out with Quentin’s screams. It _hurts_ , the way Quentin’s fear laps against his mind like so many waves on a beach, except instead of a nice calm beach there’s a fucking hurricane going on out here and Penny can’t find any fucking shelter.

Someone finds him, wakes him up, because there’s a flood of _relieffearwhereisheanxietyhurtshame_ that crests over Penny almost casually, the anticlimactic end to the shitty action movie. Eliot is saying something about drinks, maybe, or drugs. And maybe if Penny were there he’d herd Quentin down to the kitchen and get some real food into the dude, but everyone has their own way of chasing off the shadows and Penny is _really_ in no place to judge those who look at self-medicating and go, “Yeah, this works pretty well.”

And it goes on like this for days.

Not necessarily the Eliot-in-shining-liquor part, the part where Quentin gets pulled out of his dreams and into relative safety, because Quentin learns a silencing sigil after that night and spends the rest of night two screaming out his agony and terror into a Lovecraftian void of his own mind’s creation. Except somehow Penny’s managed to trap himself in that void like some fucked-up Eldritch beast, taking what bits and pieces of pain and fear Quentin tosses him like scraps and not giving them back because Quentin clearly doesn’t need them and Penny doesn’t think it’s fair that someone who tries _so fucking hard_ to be _good_ has to suffer like that alone. And it’s not even like Penny can push his way into Quentin’s dreams to snap him the fuck out of it, because Quentin’s head is so filled with _himself_ that there’s really no room left for Penny, no cracks and crevices for Penny to dig his fingers into when Quentin’s mind is bulging like an overfilled balloon about to bust.

And something in Penny is rocketing towards the breaking point too, because he sees Quentin in class, soft eyes framed by rough bruises, and all he can think is how terrifying it would be to shake himself awake one night only to find that Quentin won't. Can't. Has lost himself somewhere in the labyrinth of his dreams and can't claw his way out, not this time. The thought makes Penny more than a little sick, makes worry and possession curl tight in his gut until he just has to… _stop_. Breathe. Remind himself that Quentin is right there, smiling at whatever lame-ass joke Alice has cracked about whatever they're being taught today. He's here, alive, not trapped in a cage of white concrete and harsh leather, burning himself out with fruitless magic that bleeds into the room around him.

Night three passes in an empty blur of empty rooms that seem to suck up all noise and leather cuffs that chafe torn skin, and Penny finds himself awake at three in the morning, emptying his stomach into the toilet because holy _fuck_ , he has no idea how Quentin stands being that _empty_ . If Penny couldn’t still feel the ebb and flow of life from the dude, he wouldn’t entirely be certain that Quentin was still alive, because there’s no way that someone can simultaneously be alive and that devoid of emotion. Penny thinks he gets it now, the metaphor of flies beating themselves to death against bare bulbs, and he _really_ wishes he didn’t.

Cool hands rest against Penny’s shoulders, and he turns to see one of the other Psychic kids standing behind him. One of the older ones, though her name always seems to elude him, and Penny gets the feeling she does that on purpose. The way she takes his face in her hands is on purpose too, and it’s kind of gross because Penny was _just_ vomiting up the lining of his stomach, but that doesn’t stop her from pressing her forehead against his and just _opening_ her mind to him.

He normally _hates_ it when the Psychics do this, wishes they would just _talk about it_ , but this time Penny understands the necessity. Because his tongue would have stumbled over this too, this feeling of _right_ that happens when you’re around that one person, that Anchor, that place where you can hide pieces of yourself without fear of losing them, and that explains a _lot_ . Because they’re supposed to be two sides of the same coin, Psychic and Anchor, and that’s why it seems to Penny like Quentin is just leaving himself all over the place. Because he is, kind of, the same way everyone is, it’s just that Penny _notices_.

Instinctually, Penny wants to run. Except, maybe it’s not so much an instinctual response as it is a learned one, and Penny has _really_ spent too long in Quentin’s head if he’s started to psychoanalyze his own reactions like this. Either way, Penny’s first, visceral response is to _nope the fuck out_ , because emotions are tricky little things that Penny wants _no fucking part of_ . And weird nameless girl is giving him _that look_ , the same one Penny gives people when they’re being that particular brand of dumb, and yeah, he gets it. He’s been running a long time, from a lot of things, and maybe this _one_ thing won’t turn out that bad. Except that’s what Penny’s told himself half a hundred times before and while he really, _really_ doesn’t want to lose this chance by doing nothing, he’s _terrified_ that he might fuck something up.

And maybe he’s got a bit of Mimi in him too, the part that’s hand-shy and always snapping at people that get too close. It’s the part that showed in the scars that streaked her fur, in the proof of a hard life and a hardened heart. But she had soft parts too. She could be gentle, be protective, could bare her teeth the right way when those smaller than her, weaker than her, the little humans she called her pups, were in danger. And that’s the part of Mimi that Penny really wishes he could have inherited, but he’ll do what he can with what he has.

It’s not hard to get into Quentin’s room in the Physical house. Penny does it the old-fashioned way, because he really needs to _think_ about what he’s going to do when he gets in there. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, has never done this before except for that one time, and that was a mixture of desperation and flat-out fear. And maybe this is kind of the same, because Quentin’s fear sticks to his skin like sweat, but it feels like oil sliding against the back of his neck and it’s _disgusting_. Penny latches the window shut again, tries to take in all the little things in Quentin’s room that he half-expected to be there- the piles of books, the potted mint, the sketchbook sitting half-open on the nightstand. The Superman bedspread, even though Penny is, like, ninety percent sure that Quentin likes Batman better.

Something slides over Penny’s face, something too warm with too many finger, and it takes a long moment for Penny to understand that he’s just getting the psychic backlash from whatever Quentin is dreaming about, that they’re not back in that classroom with the Beast stepping out from the mirror, that Penny is not watching-feeling its creepy ass lay its hands all over Quentin. That this time he can _do something about it_ , can push back against the encroaching fear, curl his fingers around Quentin’s shoulders and _shake_.

Quentin jolts awake like he’s been shocked, arms flailing and a fist very nearly catching Penny in the jaw. There’s a moment of confusion, Quentin trying to figure out where he is, and Penny does what he’s been afraid of doing this whole time: he _pushes_ , ever gently, still somehow a swan dive into the darkness that swirls beneath. A whine echoes between them, a shared sound, notes just far enough off to form a chaotic melody in the space between them and it feels… It feels…

Soft. Gentle. Penny buries his fingers in Quentin’s hair and _holds_ , tries not to think about the way Quentin’s arms tremble around his waist or how Quentin heaves breaths like he can’t get enough air in his lungs or the way Quentin’s shakey exhales feel when they fan out across his collarbone. Tries not to think about the way his knees will probably ache later, protesting the way he bears his whole weight down into them to keep that weight off of Quentin. And somehow having Penny on top of him- _too big, too rough, too different. Always a tinge of fear, never certain of safety, but somehow_ \- makes Quentin feel _safe_ . Tries not to think about how they got here or where they’ll go, because overthinking is _Quentin’s_ thing, and definitely not a habit that Penny wants to pick up.

He breathes like it’s been punched out of him, like his lanky ass tries to run a marathon and got to about the quarter-way mark before his legs finally gave out beneath him, and something about that mental image makes Penny chuckle. Something about the idea of Quentin doing anything related to sports and physical activity is just profoundly amusing. That is, until Penny remembers that summer camp thing that Quentin apparently went to, and how Quentin knows how to tie a damn good knot, and suddenly it’s not so amusing as it is-

“Is this… I mean, I don’t actually- but I can-” And Quentin can’t actually get an entire thought out, air rattling in his chest like he’s knocked something loose, but Penny gets the gist of it. And it takes him a moment to realize that the _fearhappinessshamewant_ is not just Quentin’s thing, because apparently now they’re-

“Sharing,” Quentin finishes, like he knew what Penny was trying to think up before he thought it, and wow that’s simultaneously really annoying and really cool. Like drifting, just without the big awesome robots. Quentin’s face twitches, lips curling into a half-frown. “And you call me a nerd,” he accuses, and now Penny has to face the fact that he’s probably never going to be able to hide any of his knee-jerk nerdy snapbacks from this guy anymore. At the very lease Penny can take solace in the fact that it’s not _Fillory and fucking Further_.

Quentin pushes back against his mind, softly, like he’s not entirely sure what he’s allowed here and what he’s not, and Penny wants to tell him that he can have _anything_ , everything that he wants to take and to give. He doesn’t, though, because that feels like admitting something that he’s not quite ready to face yet. So instead, he sits a bit back on Quentin’s hips, feeling the tide lap at the edge of his mind. There’s irritation, kind of, at Penny’s blasphemous reference to Quentin’s favorite books. A bit of confusion, too, a reflection of Penny’s own mind for a bit, because even though Penny knew _what_ this was, kinda sorta, he has no clue what this entails. Which might have been a good thing to look up _before_ climbing through Quentin’s window in the middle of the night, yeah, but anyone can tell you that Penny’s never really been too great at thinking ahead.

And if Penny doesn’t know what he’s doing, that means Quentin must be confused to all hell- a natural state of being for the dude, Quentin never has _any fucking clue_ what the hell is going on, always just kind of roles with it and prays. But they can talk, kind of. Communicate. _Share_ . Because that’s a thing they can do now that it’s not just a one-way street. And Quentin can see the uncertainty and self-loathing that Penny keeps under his armor of thorns and distance, can see the parts that Penny hates in himself and despises in other people. Can see the way they both trusted, the way Penny handed Kady the knife just like Quentin did Julia, except all Kady did was reopen old wounds, and Julia sunk the blade in and _twisted_ and-

They’re broken people, the both of them, Penny and Quentin, jagged edges of glass that at best never quite fit, at worst cut those who try to smooth them out. And there’s no fixing what’s this broken, not really. Not Quentin’s malfunctioning neurotransmitters, not Penny’s shattered trust. But omelettes with toast, blue pills dug out of the bedside drawer, gentle touches when there’s no one else to see? It’s like taking bits of glass and making a mosaic. And it’ll take time, sure.

But now is a good a time to start as any, with Penny’s hands woven in Quentin’s hair, Quentin’s hands resting on the wings of Penny’s hips, foreheads pressed together in a rough mockery of intimacy. They’re broken people, Quentin and Penny, sure, but together they might resemble something whole.


	2. Behaving as the Wind Behaves (No Nearer)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like many things I write, this started as a one-shot and quickly spiraled out of control.

Quentin does not, in fact, live entirely in his head. Surprise surprise.

He has an existence outside the four white walls of his dreamworld. For the most part, that existence consists of other people, because if he were all alone Quentin _would_ retreat into his head. And yeah, they’re the same people that his subconscious tries to project his flaws onto, except in the real world there isn’t a lot of projecting that needs to be done, they all share little marks and scars they’ve all earned their own ways, and somehow that makes them more real and believable than the phantoms that ghost Quentin’s dreams. There’s shy Alice and self-loathing Eliot, self-sacrificing Margo and-

Penny. Now there’s Penny, Quentin supposes, who somehow manages to encompass all of those things and none of them at the same time. Quentin isn’t entirely sure how Penny is supposed to fit into this puzzle, like he’s that piece that’s supposed to go in the middle of that section he hasn’t actually worked on yet, but real-life-Penny is also the closest thing to a constant that Quentin has been able to find. And maybe that’s what he’s been looking for this entire time, that one constant across all of the equations. Like when they first teach you kinematics in high-school? As four different equations, and you spend half the year staring at the four of them trying to puzzle them out until you finally find that underlying variable across all of them and realize that they’re actually just _all one equation_.

Which is not to say that Penny is the final form of Quentin’s messed-up friend’s group. He’s more like… like… Like the chesspiece on an old board, that one you’ve been missing for a while but haven’t realized you’ve been missing because you never really get the chance to play. And then you find that piece again at the most random time and think, _Oh, yeah, I enjoy playing chess, don’t I?_ And that’s kind of the realization that Penny was for Quentin. Except, instead of chess it’s Quentin’s bisexuality that he somehow managed to _forget, how in the world do you forget that you like boys?_

Very easily, as it turns out. Honestly, it was probably always lurking there, in the way Quentin looked at James (backstabbing bag of dicks) or Eliot (strictly a straight-guy-crush) or even _Penny_ (though, to be fair, he never actually realized he was doing that until shit got _very real_ ). But Quentin might have just been a little to caught up in the girls in his life to really notice, Julia (see: backstabbing bag of dicks, but somehow, somewhere in his heart, Quentin hasn’t managed to stop loving her yet) and then Alice (his best friend, he _fucked his best friend_ , which wasn’t a mistake so much as it was a series of enlightening misunderstandings, and somehow they’re even _better_ friends for it) taking up all the extra space in his head that he’d allotted for romantic/sexual relationships. Which really isn’t a lot of space, and Quentin still has no earthly idea how people manage romantic and sexual relationships with _more than one person_ , but that’s not the point that he’s trying to address here, is it?

The point Quentin is trying to make is that Penny feels like the first good thing he’s had in a long time, and that comes with immediate suspicion. Because, and this is another shocking surprise, Quentin hasn’t exactly had a great track-record with good things. Either he’s managed to mess it up, or someone else has, and either way Quentin has been left with the short straw and the task of picking up the bits of himself that they’ve shattered him into (or he’s shattered himself into, Quentin will be the first to admit that he’s had his fair share of self-destructive relationships).

Except, instead of nice, soft bits of paper, which you would assume he would be made of considering how _delicate_ he is, Quentin’s pieces are all sharp shards of glass, and he just ends up hurting himself worse trying to put himself back together. And yeah, that last bout of heartbreak might have broken Quentin something horrible, and yeah, maybe when he superglued everything back together the lines didn’t match up quite right, but isn’t that the story of his life? Handing himself over on a silver platter to people who are just going to hurt him, again and again and again because apparently he is _incapable of learning_. And isn’t that one of the definitions of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?

Quentin must really, truly be insane, then, because Penny shows him a moment’s consideration, a minute’s kindness, and Quentin is falling the rest of the way head-over-heels into what will probably be another crack in his already-crumbling castle. He just hopes that this time it brings the whole place down around his head, because he doesn’t think he can handle it anymore. He doesn’t want to let his heart atrophy from disuse, doesn’t want to stop loving, stop caring, but he’s a visceral creature by nature, trying desperately to shy away from pain and still steal scraps of pleasure. And the metaphor of flies beating themselves to death against bare bulbs makes a lot more sense when you look at it from this angle, but Quentin would really rather live outside of his head for now, thank you very much.

Which is where the problems start to crop up, as it turns out, because the world between the four white walls of Quentin’s dreamworld happen to make a lot more sense than the reality he wakes up to everyday. Because something in him doesn’t quite want to believe that magic is real, that there can be a land of eternal summer and a real gateway into Fillory, that very real monsters can walk between the worlds and for some reason one of them has put _Quentin_ on its list. Doesn’t want to believe that people like Alice and Eliot and Margo can exist, not in the way that they do. Doesn’t want to believe that someone like _Penny_ can exist, someone who’s love (and Quentin hesitates to call it that, because _love_ involves admitting things that neither of them want to face right now) burns so bright Quentin can swear he’s catching flame from the inside out, that by the end of this all that’ll be left of him will be ash and he’ll be _totally okay with that_.

Something in him is more comfortable with four white walls and multi-color pills that are never actually taken and empty rooms with beds with leather cuffs that chafe at raw flesh and flies that beat themselves to death against bare bulbs. Because at least that World Between the Walls makes sense, is logical enough that Quentin might be able to fit it into an equation if he tried hard enough, some addition of logic and uselessness that equals some empty variable.

And another, Margo-the-compromiser part of him is trying to tell him that both existences can be legitimate in their own way. Some infinities are bigger than others, after all, and the infinity between zero and two does, in fact, contain the infinity between zero and one. And if the existence of an infinity within and infinity doesn’t rule out either infinity, then why can’t that same logic be applied to the World-Between-the-Walls that just happens to exist within that world-of-magic-and-Penny?

Quentin sighs into his hands, a headache building behind his eyes, and he half-thinks to reach out to Penny before he remembers that he’s actually supposed to be researching Psychic bonds and that they’re supposed to be doing so _separately_ , to ensure that they’re as clear-headed as possible. Which is kind of redundant in Quentin’s case? Because he doesn’t actually remember the last time he had a clear head. He’ll humor Penny, though, mostly because Penny at least pretends to know what he’s doing, which is a skill Quentin really wishes he could have.

A coffee gets pushed across the table by Alice, and Quentin is half-hesitant to pick it up because these books feel _old,_ and it would be a damn shame to accidentally ruin them for want of a warm drink. His hands are _really freaking cold_ , though, and unfortunately these old books haven’t been half as helpful as Quentin had hoped. They’re all willing to detail the perks of Psychic bonding, but the cons and the mechanics are apparently supposed to be a little fuzzy. It’s really annoying, honestly, because Quentin would just like to know what he’s getting into for once. And he kind of understands what he’s getting into, diving into a relationship with Penny, but this whole bonding thing is new territory that Quentin is really, _really_ wary about stepping into.

There’s a very clear way to break the bond, ironically enough. It doesn’t take very much. Quentin dwells on the subject for all of three seconds before pushing it to the back of his mind and deciding to never think about it again. Because being bound to Penny, it’s been _nice_ , and yeah, Quentin might be handing the knife to another person who’s just going to gut him and leave him for dead, but somehow he has the feeling that Penny won’t do that. Or he could just be very, very stupid, sticking his neck out for the guillotine that’s already falling, but it’s not like he hasn’t made this same mistake what seems like a hundred times before. He’ll probably keep making it, honestly, because he’s a glutton for punishment and doesn’t actually have any self-preservation instincts.

He checks out the last couple books he hasn’t read yet when it gets late enough that Alice’s eyelids start to drop where she’s resting her chin in her hand across the desk from him. And he would feel halfway guilty for keeping her out this late, but Alice is a grown woman who can make choices of her own, and if she wants to stay up late with Quentin researching relatively obscure and specific magics, he’s not about to argue with her. Which doesn’t stop him from sharing another coffee with her on the way back to the Physical cabin, just to make sure she doesn’t topple over and pass out on the paved stone path.

Penny is there in Quentin’s room, waiting like he has been these past few nights since The Nightmare, thumbing through Quentin’s well-worn copy of _Fillory and Further,_ book one. It’s not Penny’s favorite part of Quentin’s admittedly-smaller-than-he’d-like collection (that would be _The Fellowship of the Ring_ ), but Quentin supposes it’s just one that Penny hasn’t read before. And Quentin is suddenly struck with the thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to come back every night to this, come _home_ every night to this, to Penny lounging on Quentin’s bed with all the entitlement of a cat who very much belongs there. It’s a ridiculous thought, of course, because there’s no way in hell that anyone’s going to “make an honest man” out of Penny, much less someone like Quentin, but that doesn’t meant that it’s not-

“Get out of your head, pretty boy,” Penny mutters, mind pressing against Quentin’s like a cool towel against a burn. There’s a passing moment of blissful _silence_ with him there, taking up space in Quentin’s head, a lull in the storm, and it’s _nice_. Passes too soon, of course, before Quentin is over-analyzing how Penny can have that kind of effect on him, but in the moment Quentin can feel the worst of his stress fall off his shoulders in a sheet of iron and lead. Like shedding your armor at the end of the day, except Quentin’s armor is torn and rended and offers about as much protection as “stylized” female video game armor at this point, and he has to wear it anyway because it’s all he has.

“I now have the mental image of you in a chainmail bikini,” Penny grumbles, shifting in the small bed so that Quentin can curl up to his side. The bed is too small, really, but Quentin is a cuddlebug and Penny doesn’t show any inclination to leave, so it works. “Not exactly what I wanted to go to sleep to.”

Quentin chuckles under his breath, struggles to keep his eyes open and read along with Penny. He doesn’t want to sleep, not really, not ever. Because sleep means the World Between the Walls, the place where he can’t quite escape. It scares him, how quickly (willingly) he falls into that place after falling asleep, and he doesn’t want to. Not tonight. But he can’t keep his eyes open, not with Penny a soothing monolith at his side, playing with his hair and lulling him into something similar to peace.

A blink. That’s all it takes for Quentin to find himself between those four white walls. To find himself staring at the blank white ceiling, leather cuffs digging into his skin where he’s not lying quite right for comfort. To find himself in silence broken only by the buzz of flies beating themselves to death against bare bulbs. To find himself in a place that makes _sense_ in a sick sort of way. Which is only because of it validates the malicious little voices that tell him this is all he deserves, Quentin _knows_. “Knowing” and “believing”, though? Those are two very different states of mind.

He’s probably spent half an eternity in this very room, Quentin has. If not this room, than in this place, where there are happy little pills and people whose faces he knows but personalities are foreign blank-faced nurses trying to shove food down his throat claiming it to be “his favorite”. And no matter where he goes, he can’t seem to get away from Dr. London’s voice, as loud as any voice is in your head because you can’t actually turn the volume up or down. The words are scrawled across the walls, too, like shitty graffiti, grim but worldly reminders of why he’s here in the first place.

_“You reported that you had difficulty getting out of bed, sleeping, and eating. You claimed to feel like the most useless person in the world.”_

Quentin knows that feelings don’t always tell the truth, especially when the brain is muddled by faulty wiring and abnormal mixtures of neurotransmitters. Again, though, “knowing” and “believing” are two very different states of mind, and the line between “feelings that are true” and “feelings that are not true” can be very easily blurred when your environment seems to support one over the other. Which is why Quentin never really understood the environment of mental hospitals, not really, because whose grand idea was it to put a bunch of mentally ill, depressed people in one of the most depressing places on Earth?

At the very least, it seems to be empty this time. Quentin’ll take an eternity of empty rooms to the torture that is the Beast, lurking in the walls, reminding him of just how useless he is, how fruitless his fight will be. How everyone he knows will, somehow and in some way, die, no matter what he tries to do. How some of those deaths will, are, have been _his fault_. And that guilt will never leave, no matter how many times he tries to wash it from his skin or cut it out from his flesh.

“You have very real problems, you know that?” Penny says, and Quentin can’t help the relief that washes out of him in a flood. It colors the walls of the room, a flush of bright before the white sucks it back in again, and even though Quentin has no control over that, it does serve to remind him that he’s dreaming, he can control this. He doesn’t have to be in this room, in this place, in this bed with the scratchy sheets, wearing scratchy clothes and shoes without laces.

There aren’t a lot of memories left in Quentin’s head that haven’t been tainted in some way. His house is filled with sickness and futility, Brakebills with fear and anxiety, Julia with pain and bitterness. It’s easier just to let Penny pick where the door will go, to let himself be dragged into empty streets and warm humid heat, into brightly-colored bazaars halfway around the world or quiet monasteries on snowy mountains. And they’re not travelling, not really (at least, Quentin hopes they’re not), but these places seem as real as any place Quentin has ever been to. Infinities within infinities, no less expansive for the fact they’re constructed inside another.

And in a way Penny is his own infinity, Quentin thinks. He’s that Ad Reinhardt painting, the one that just looks black from a distance. Up close, though, Quentin can see all the different colors that compose the piece, each so deep and intense that he can never quite tell which one is the true black. And maybe there isn’t one? Because in a way, they’re _all_ black, and in another way _none_ of them are black. In the same way that infinities can be finite, but that doesn’t make them any less vast. And Penny, Penny is the infinity defined between zero and one, he’s the Ad Reinhardt seen from a distance. He’s every chemical and component of his physical form, he’s every experience he’s ever had, every scar- physical, mental, emotional- that he’s ever received. He’s all of that and _more_ , and-

The void stretches out around them, vast in its confines. The ground beneath them is everything and nothing, and Quentin’s stomach drops before he closes his eyes and clings to Penny’s arms, knuckles white, feels Penny doing the same to the sharp ridges of his hip bones. They’re falling and flying in an instant, together, and that’s the point of the bond, isn’t it? It should have been so _obvious_ this whole time, but like the dumb piece of shit he is Quentin was looking for someone to spell it out for him, the answer that was _right in front of him_ this whole time.

Penny’s hands are almost burning when they cradle Quentin’s face, lips petal soft in a way that Quentin hadn’t actually expected. Kissing Penny isn’t anything like kissing Alice (which is a terrible reference point, probably, yeah, but Quentin doesn’t have anything else to go off of, okay?). With Alice it was all desperate hunger, the kind that sears through you like a drug, leaving you scalded in its wake. This is soft, gentle, like Quentin could shatter into a million pieces beneath Penny’s hands and yeah, he might? But he won’t, because Penny is here, holding him together, kissing him like he’s something _worth something_ , and Quentin is so, so afraid that this might all just be a projection of his messed-up head, a desperate attempt to make reality a little more bearable, but if it is all he’s going to succeed in doing is breaking his own heart all over again. And yeah, the sound Quentin lets out might kind of resemble a sob, but if this isn’t real then he doesn’t want to be either.

He doesn’t know what wakes him, but it’s the gasping kind of alertness that leaves Quentin’s lungs struggling for air. There’s a solid weight at his side, Penny, breathing just as heavily as he is, arms around his waist, holding him close like he’ll disappear between one moment and the next. It hurts a little bit, sure, but Quentin is fine with that, because he can tangle one hand in Penny’s hair, the other in his nightshirt, tuck his face into the crook of Penny’s neck and _breathe_.

They kiss again, and the angle’s all wrong, and they’re teeth click together, but Quentin never wants to let this go.


	3. Three Little Words (Whispered Like Prayers)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will be the last part. Sorry for the long wait, and I hope you guys enjoy.

One of the nice things about being a traveller is that he doesn’t have to get up early in the morning to sneak back into the Psychic house. Jumps out the window, travelling as he’s falling, because Quentin’s figured out some delicate lattice of spells and wards in his room to keep Penny from travelling while he sleeps and accidentally dragging Quentin along with him. And Penny doesn’t want to sneak out, really. Shouldn’t have to, considering that almost every person in the Physical kids’ college knows that he’s there. He’ll humor Quentin, though, if only so that he doesn’t freak the fuck out over breakfast. Which is understandable, kind of- according to Alice, Quentin was like that during their relationship as well.

Alice also told him that if he ever hurt Quentin, she would remove his balls with a rusty knife, and Penny’s not sure that there’s anything more terrifying than getting the shovel talk from a woman perfectly willing and able to carry out her threat. It’s like, Beast levels of fear. And Penny’s not sure how he’s supposed to feel about that. Scared. And a maybe little impressed? But mostly just viscerally terrified. 

It gets a laugh out of Quentin when Penny tells him this. A cute little giggle, hidden behind his hand, hair falling in front of his face, and  _ holy shit _ Penny’s in deep. He half worries that this is going to be a habit for him, a terrible,  _ horrible _ habit, tearing his heart out of his chest and offering it to his partner on a platter. Then he realizes that he doesn’t really care, because if you’re going to live, you might as well live in the moment, right? And this moment, talking and laughing and picking food off of Quentin’s plate when he isn’t looking, is a moment worth living in. 

They kiss, for a moment, parting ways after lunch. A chaste thing, little more than a press of lips against lips. Casual intimacy- it’s not something that Penny’s used to, but he thinks that he could. He could get used to the way Quentin’s hand fits in his, always cold, like he can never quite get warm. Penny thinks about the zeroth law of thermodynamics, that two objects connected by a path permeable to heat will try to reach thermal equilibrium. Rubs his palms together and thinks about how magic and science are twins, and how he might be spending way too much time in Quentin’s head if he’s starting to think like this- in theoreticals and abstracts and truths that are as likely to be true as they are to twist on themselves, ouroboros on paper and in the motions of hands that create a hurricane inside a building. 

He buries the thoughts in dubstep and Faulkner, sitting in Quentin’s bed because he enjoys the privacy of not having half a dozen Psychics pressing at his head at any one time. Except he’s not really reading the Faulkner, because as interesting as the story of the kid and the bear is that guy’s writing style leaves a great deal to be desired. Clarity, for example, because Penny has been battling with the novel experience of ending a sentence and having to go back to the beginning because what was the point he was trying to make again? So instead he looks around the room, taking in the piles of books on the desk because Quentin wants to know as much as he can and never seems to have enough time to learn any of it at all. Takes in the way that Quentin does, in fact, have a Batman bedspread that he switches to when he needs to wash the Superman one despite the fact that there are spells that do that shit pretty much instantly. 

Takes in the silence sigils that are still scribbled onto the walls with chalk, because the nights of nightmares and screaming haven’t really gone away. Of course they haven’t, Penny isn’t some sort of miracle cure to Quentin’s Beast-induced PTSD that might not entirely be the Beast’s fault, because while Creepy Mothman might be a large part of the fear-factor he’s only, like, maybe twelve percent of the dream itself? The rest is the same old metaphor, an old movie played over and over. Except instead of being a casual moviegoer with a fondness of old films, Quentin is an actor stuck in the never ending loop of being forced to choose between everything he could be and everything he’s ever loved, and he hesitates so Beast takes both and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. Ouroboros, eating their own tails, hating the taste and the pain but stuck in the familiarity of it all because without the rusty taste of their own blood and the pain of their own fangs in their flesh they don’t know what’s safe and what’s not. 

You know, the kind of shit that would give psychologists nightmares if Quentin ever decided he wanted to go to a professional to talk about it. Which he doesn’t, because there’s no better way to turn someone against the medical system than to turn their own head against them and make a mental hospital the setting for tearing their brain apart with a pair of tweezers. And Penny likes to think that he’s  _ helping _ , if nothing else, but he’s been through enough shit to understand that progress is taking three steps forward and two steps back, and they just have to be content that they’re still coming out the other side having taken at least one step in the direction of “okay”.

Penny can feel Quentin even before he gets through the front door, dragging his feet on the concrete and stumbling past Eliot’s attempt to offer him a drink. He’s not tired, perse, just down in a way that no amount of sleep or caffeine is really going to help. It’s the bone-deep kind of exhausting, the kind that weighs you down when you’re trying to stagger up the stairs, bag suddenly too heavy on your shoulder. It’s the kind that bites at your ankles like a bear trap, painful and ponderous and you just have to keep trudging on. 

It’s like this sometimes, Penny knows. There’s little rhyme or reason to mental illness, no schedule to the bad days and the okay days and the days like this. There’s nothing more they can do but roll with it, as infuriating as that is sometimes. And it is infuriating. It’s  _ hard _ , watching the way Quentin drops his bag by the door like it’s filled with bricks, the way his fingers twitch like he wants to check his wards. The way his eyes flick between Penny on the bed and the hard-ass desk chair that he keeps for some ungodly reason (he keeps it because he never actually uses his desk, does all his homework sprawled out on his bed or in the library or the common rooms or over a cup of something warm on the floor of Alice’s room). 

And it’s not like Quentin makes it any easier. Penny’s not pointing fingers, he  _ gets _ it. How hard it can be to ask for what you want, what you  _ need _ , when you’ve always been told that your wants and needs always come second. He  _ get’s  _ that. But that doesn’t make it any less difficult to figure out how to help Quentin when he’s stuck in that sick limbo between “falling apart” and “fine” (probably the biggest lie humanity’s ever told). Quentin’s thoughts rarely offer any coherent insight, as chaotic and scrambled as they are. So Penny takes shots in the dark, puts his best educated guesses to the test and hopes for the best. It’s not the most effective method, sure, but it works. Kind of.

At the risk of sounding like a Disney character, he doesn’t want to say he’s in love. Because they’ve gone from antagonistic friends to something-like-partners in the span of a couple days and that’s not enough time for Penny to really cement how he feels. The last time he fell hard and fast, it was Kady, and this is not Kady. Kady was something like love on the tip of his tongue, sweet in the way that cranberries are sweet, and sour too, but you just keep eating to chase that taste. And he’s  _ in _ love with her, still. He’s not sure if that’s going to ever change. They both get that, Penny and Quentin, and neither of them are going to force Penny to let that go.

This thing he has with Quentin, though, it’s something like love at the tips of his fingers, brushed against soft skin in the early hours of the morning, and he loves Quentin. Loves the slope of Quentin’s nose. The way his hair falls when he’s studying and not paying attention and forgot to pull it back. The way he sometimes sings Imagine Dragons in his head because he either needs Penny’s attention or needs to lose his own. The way he’s willing to quip back, as nervous as he is sometimes, words stuttering over his tongue and the smile on his face as bright as the sun in the sky. He  _ loves _ Quentin, he really does, cloying sweetness like honeycomb in the summer, comforting softness like a well-worn shirt.

He loves Quentin, but he’s not  _ in _ love. And that difference is everything. Because Eliot and Quentin still like to sit a little too close, push a little too far, flirt a little too hard, steal alcohol-stained kisses on the couch in the lounge, and Penny doesn’t mind. Because Margo and Quentin like to sprawl across each other on the couch in the lounge and talk about nothing until the sun comes up, like to shower together sometimes because Quentin likes the feeling of having his hair played with by someone who knows what she’s doing, and Penny doesn’t mind. Because Alice and Quentin like to hold hands sometimes, study together over coffee way too late in the morning, and sometimes Penny will come in at night and see them curled around each other on Quentin’s tiny bed and see himself out, and Penny  _ doesn’t mind _ . Because he get’s it, Quentin is addicting, warm and soft and caring, and they love him too. Penny’s not gonna fault them for that. He’s never really been possessive, doesn’t really feel the need to start now. Besides, if there’s one thing that Quentin needs, it’s all the affection he can get.

Well, that and a bigger bed, because Quentin’s elbows are boney as fuck, digging into Penny’s ribs and hips whenever he shifts thoughtlessly. Which he does, a lot, because Penny is admittedly not the best body pillow, and the mattress is as hard as an alleyway fuck. Like, hard enough to make Penny wonder how Quentin gets any sleep at all on it, then remember that not all people grew up without a proper bed to sleep in and therefore don’t always properly appreciate the comfort of lying on the physical equivalent of a cloud. When he slept in here on his own, Quentin made up for the hardness of his mattress with an actual fuckton of pillows, now neatly stacked in the closet for easy access. Penny mulls over the concept of just building a pillow nest to sleep in instead. They’d need more pillow, probably. Maybe all of Penny’s from the Psychic house. Offer to timeshare with Alice to get one of those microbead pillows that she uses as seats when she and Quentin are studying. 

“Eliot has a feather-stuffed comforter,” Quentin mutters around a yawn and yeah, a feather-stuffed comforter sounds fucking  _ amazing _ . He’s got his legs tangled with Penny’s at this point, one arm thrown across Penny’s chest, the other beneath the pillow under his head- it goes from bottom to top Quentin’s arm, the thin-ass pillow, Penny’s bicep, which is not very conducive to ideal spine alignment and will probably be uncomfortable later. Quentin seems perfectly content with it, though, so Penny’s not going to say anything. Doesn’t need to, apparently- the psychic bond has been getting steadily stronger as the weeks go on, to the point that Penny sometimes catches himself daydreaming in Quentin’s thoughts, and vice versa. And Quentin’s arm shifts to under Penny’s back, where it will probably fall asleep in pins and needles later, but it somewhat corrects the line of his spine, and he does admit that it’s vastly more comfortable.  

And Quentin’s thinking of pillow forts with his dad, only one time but a bright moment he can never really remember properly but will never truly forget. He’s thinking of the way the comforter is a silk-polyester blend that makes his hair all staticky when he lies on it. He’s thinking about the feeling of Penny’s hand pushing through his hair, of T.S. Eliot and being remembered  _ not as lost, violent souls, but as only as the Hollow Men, the stuffed men _ . Muses in that tired, half-coherent kind of way about how he used to see Penny and how he sees Penny now, the same way you’d dismiss a work of art from a distance but stand in awe up close because there’s just so much  _ detail _ you never even thought existed, and Penny is insulted and flattered in the same. 

Then he’s asleep, Quentin, drifting off into that lulling darkness, that tide of quiet that pushes and pulls at Penny’s mind as well. One of the few times Quentin’s mind is completely clear- when he’s sleeping, when he’s reading, and when Penny kisses him. It’ll be about forty minutes until the dreams start, if they start at all tonight, vague and indistinct but still uncomfortable. Until then, Penny is just going to enjoy the feeling of falling into Quentin’s mind without the constant buzz of anxiety that isn’t even his at the base of his skull.

Penny drifts off. The dreams don’t come. They wake up at about midnight and get ready for bed properly, shower together, brush their teeth with their elbows bumping and Quentin half dozing with his elbows on the countertop. Crawl back into bed with their hair still wet, pajamas still sticking to their skin in the odd places the towels didn’t completely dry. Curl around each other with the ease of instinct, fitting together in that tiny bed like two puzzle pieces, to halves of the same broken pane of glass. 

And they wake in the morning, Penny half on top of Quentin, Quentin’s face shoved into the crook of Penny’s neck, covers kicked off the end of the bed because the warmth of two bodies in such a tiny space is more than enough. The zeroth law of thermodynamics, two objects in thermal equilibrium. Science and magic are two sides of the same coin, and you can love someone and never be in love and it doesn’t make your love any less important. And you can love multiple people in the same way and different, but that doesn’t mean that Quentin loves Penny any less. 

A dangerous word, “love”, but Penny can’t find any other words in the English language that aptly describe what he’s feeling. Because English just doesn’t have enough words for love, doesn’t have enough words to describe the flutter in Penny’s chest when Quentin smiles or the way Quentin feels at home in Penny’s arms, and Margo’s and Alice’s and Eliot’s (and one day Penny’s going to find a bed big enough to fit all of them, or maybe make a pillow nest, and they are going to have a  _ party _ ). There aren’t words in the English language for the ache in Penny’s chest when he kisses Quentin, knowing that this soft feeling of Quentin’s mouth against his own doesn’t exclusively belong to him and not wanting it to. 

Knowing that other hands have traced this same path down Quentin’s sides, other hips have straddled this waist, other eyes have taken in these details, and being completely okay with that. There just aren’t words to describe it, at least not ones that Penny knows. So he mouths the words he does have into the marks he leaves against Quentin’s collarbone, high enough on Quentin’s throat that even a scarf probably won’t properly cover them. Whispers the words he does know against the wings of Quentin’s hipbones, so sharp because he either eats too much or too little but unfortunately the two don’t always balance out. Murmurs the words he does know like little prayers against the inside of Quentin’s wrist, the hollow of his throat, that spot just below his navel that makes him arch his back and keen into his fist, and Penny wishes he had Faulkner’s eloquence, that ability to begin a sentence with one subject and end on another but somehow still conveying that feeling the words themselves never could. Wishes he knew more words in more languages, knew how to worship in more tongues than his own.

Wishes his tongue weren’t bound to this one language, weren’t limited to this inadequate vocabulary, but knows that sometimes actions need no words behind them. Knows that the press of his mind, the brush of his lips and the roll of his hips, can convey the feelings that he’ll never have words for. Knows that Quentin loves him even like this, shaking in his uncertainty and in his need, skittering hands pressing and pulling. Presses and pulls back because there’s no shame here, no need to explain. Just the two of them, two minds tangled together, benediction in the drag of skin against skin. 

They shower together because everyone’s already up and moving at this point. Quentin lets Margo braid his hair while Penny makes pancakes, because being up for a while doesn’t mean any of the the three people who were standing around in the kitchen when Quentin and Penny came down have actually eaten yet. Eliot hip-checks Penny on his way to grab a glass of milk, still arguing with Alice about something or another that’s probably a rollover from last night, and Penny doesn’t actually have words for this. 

He makes a smiley face with the blueberries in the pancake, and thinks that maybe that sums it all up pretty nicely. 


End file.
